Cyril Jackson

Who was Cyril Jackson?

Cyril Jackson was a South African astronomer.

He was born in Ossett, Yorkshire in England, but his father emigrated to South Africa in 1911.

He worked at Union Observatory in Johannesburg from 1928 to 1947. He served with South African forces in the second world war, and was mentioned in despatches. After the war he was director of the Yale-Columbia Southern Observatory station in Johannesburg, which had been established by Yale University in the 1920s. Columbia University subsequently collaborated in that venture and the operation became known as the Yale-Columbia Southern Observatory. Due to light pollution that observatory had to be shut down in 1951 and he supervised the move of its instrument, a 26-inch refracting telescope, to Mount Stromlo Observatory in Australia. This Yale-Columbia telescope was given to the Australian National University in July 1963, and was destroyed in the 18 January 2003 firestorm that devastated Mount Stromlo.

Jackson worked at Mount Stromlo from 1957 to 1963. In 1963, Yale reopened its Columbia Southern Observatory at El Leoncito, Argentina, and he served as its director there until 1966, when he retired.